New Delhi, July 2 -- Financial conglomerate India Infoline Limited (IIFL) is planning to roll out Artificial Intelligence (AI) virtual assistants for each of its 50,000 employees this year, focused on internal use cases. Employees could use it to resolve common queries across Human Resources (HR), Information Technology (IT), and other internal support functions. The company has already tested its pilot mode at the beginning of 2025.
"The pilot run validated our assumptions that most of the queries were repetitive and easily handled by the assistant, with no major technical roadblocks," Gaurav Sharma, the chief technology officer (CTO), IIFL Finance, told TechCircle in an interview. He also leads the shared services from an infrastructure perspective at a group level.
IIFL Finance is one of the three listed entities under the IIFL Group umbrella; it is a prominent non-banking financial company (NBFC) offering a range of lending, investment, and financial services, especially for retail and MSME customers.
IIFL has partnered with Microsoft to adopt Copilot as the virtual assistant of choice. The company is currently in the process of enabling and integrating Copilot across the organisation. These assistants are expected to provide immediate and on-demand support. Further, the centralised support teams that traditionally handled these queries will see a significant reduction in workload, resulting in lower operational costs, noted Sharma.
These initiatives come with its set of unique challenges. Sharma said that they have identified two important factors, solving which will be critical to driving adoption at scale.
"First, multilingual capability: many of our employees, particularly in South India, are more comfortable in their native languages than in English. To address this, we're now working on enabling regional language support within the assistant," he said.
"Second, we've realised that while chat-based interfaces are effective, voice interaction is even more intuitive for many users. We're actively exploring voice-enabled features to make the experience even more seamless and accessible."
AI for efficiency and performance
Initially, for IIFL, the use of AI was centered around traditional machine learning models, primarily for creditworthiness assessments and fraud detection. These models played a key role in enhancing risk evaluation and underwriting processes. However, with the advent of generative AI, the focus expanded to customer experience.
"Looking ahead, we are now exploring the application of generative AI in areas such as compliance, audit management, risk management, and regulatory reporting. These are high-impact functions where AI can bring automation, accuracy, and predictive insights. While we have not yet deployed solutions in these areas, foundational work is underway," said Sharma.
The company is also training its internal teams-software engineers, testers, product managers, and designers-with AI tools to boost productivity and reduce development time.
IIFL's digital transformation journey
Cloud infrastructure forms the backbone of IIFL's digital transformation journey. In terms of a financial hardware infrastructure perspective, the company is fully on the cloud. "Across our group entities as well, unless specifically required by regulators, most systems have been migrated to the cloud. So, in terms of core IT infrastructure, we are modernized and cloud-native," said Sharma.
All the non-business applications, such as CRMs, HR systems, and other internal tools, have been moved to modern, off-the-shelf platforms. On the business side, all customer- and partner-facing systems have also been modernised over the last two years, explained Sharma.
"In cases where legacy or in-house systems still exist, we have layered them with APIs to make them interoperable and accessible for digital front-end applications and GenAI initiatives," he said. This ensures that even if the core hasn't been replaced yet, it's still usable in a modern digital ecosystem.
"The only legacy system that remains is our core business application within the home finance unit, which continues to be in-house, which is 10-12% of the overall application landscape. However, in our other group companies, even the core business systems have transitioned to off-the-shelf solutions," he added.
IIFL works closely with fintech startups that provide specialised services. Sharma classifies them into categories. First are the data service providers that provide customer data validation, income assessment, document verification, tax data access, and third-party verifications. Second, there are platform providers that present plug-and-play solutions to support specific parts of our operations.
"For example, we previously partnered with an outsourced fintech agency for our business loan process. While we have since transitioned some of these systems in-house, we still rely on select platform providers to quickly roll out capabilities where building internally may not be immediately feasible. These partnerships allow us to maintain agility and accelerate our go-to-market timelines," he said.
Digitisation plans ahead
In November 2022, IIFL launched a Digital Center of Excellence (CoE) in Bengaluru, which acts as a nucleus for all future digitisation, innovation, and technology-led initiatives. About 150 technical staff work here, forming a part of the larger 250-member strong technology team.
The virtual AI assistant initiative was born out of this center. Further, the team is working on a wide range of generative AI applications that span across the organisation.
"Over the next six to eight months, we have a pipeline of initiatives planned. These include AI-driven enhancements in risk management, audit, and compliance. The goal is to embed generative AI into every critical function, driving smarter decisions and faster execution," said Kumar.
Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from TechCircle.